Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are vehicles that can be remote controlled or made to fly autonomously based on pre-programmed flight plans or even made to fly by more complex dynamic automation systems.
However, because of the rigorous national and international rules and regulations that specify a wide range of requirements that must be met by such a system and all its integrated parts in order to be approved for aviation, the different parts inside an airborne system in a UAV are designed to work as a tightly coupled integrated system. This is to ensure that the complete UAV system and all its integrated parts as such can be accurately verified, validated and certified for aviation.
By having an airborne system with a tightly coupled integrated system design, it follows that if one part in the airborne system is exchanged for another completely new part, an upgraded part or the like, not only does the new or upgraded part have to be verified, validated and certified for aviation but also the complete integrated airborne system has to be re-verified, re-validated and re-certified for aviation. Thus, because of the often drawn out development process of such advanced airborne systems and since there is a need to constantly update and/or replace different parts of the system so as to incorporate the latest developments, for example, replacing a certain sensor with a more sensitive or accurate sensor, much time and effort is put on performing the more administrative tasks of verification and re-verification, validation and re-validation, and certification and re-certification of each part, subsystem and eventually the complete airborne system.
This also leads to further difficulties as an end-user of a UAV-system almost always has certain specifications depending on the purpose of the system and its intended use. These customizations are very difficult to perform in a tightly coupled airborne system since every adaptation or specific configuration has to go through the approval process described above.
The development of advanced airborne systems, such as UAVs, is often associated with long development cycles and the UAVs are also designed to have long life-span expectancy. This further increases the need in the development of UAVs for a more flexible, simpler and manageable airborne system architecture.